“You got it, sir.” Armitage wondered what the hell this was all about. He hadn’t seen the TV this morning, nor heard what was going on yet. In any case, he didn’t care all that much. Fifty-five and looking forward to retirement after thirty-two years of government service, he just wanted to do his job and leave.
“GOOD MOVE, DAN,” Martin said into the phone. They were in the Oval Office now. “Back to you.” The attorney hung up and turned.
“Murray sent one of his roving inspectors over, Pat O’Day. Good man, troubleshooter. He’s being backed up by OPR guys”–Martin explained briefly what that meant– “another smart move. They’re apolitical. With that done, Murray has to back away from things.”
“Why?” Jack asked, still trying to catch up.
“You appointed him acting Director. I can’t be involved much with this, either. You need to select someone to run the investigation. He has to be smart, clean, and not the least bit political. Probably a judge,” Martin thought. “Like a Chief Judge of a U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. There’s lots of good ones.”
“Any ideas?” Arnie asked.
“You have to get that name from somebody else. I can’t emphasize enough, this has to be clean in every pos-
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sible respect. Gentlemen, we’re talking about the Constitution of the United States here.” Martin paused. He had to explain things. “That’s like the Bible for me, okay? For you, too, sure, but I started off as an FBI agent. I worked mainly civil-rights stuff, all those sheet-heads in the South. Civil rights are important, I learned that looking at the bodies of people who died trying to secure those rights for other people they didn’t even know. Okay, I left the Bureau, entered the bar, did a little private practice, but I guess I never stopped being a cop, and so I came back in. At Justice, I’ve worked OC, I’ve worked espionage, and now I just started running the Criminal Division. This is important stuff to me. You have to do it the right way.”
“We will,” Ryan told him. “But it would be nice to know how.”
That evoked a snort. “Damned if I know. On the substance of the issue, anyway. On the form, it has to appear totally clean, no questions at all. That’s impossible, but you have to try anyway. That’s the legal side. The political side I leave to you.”
“Okay. And the crash investigation?” Ryan was slightly . amazed with himself. He’d actually turned away from the investigation to something else. Damn.
This time Martin smiled. “That pissed me off, Mr. President. I don’t like having people to tell me how to run a case. If Sato were alive, I could take him into court today. There won’t be any surprises. The thing Kealty said about the JFK investigation was pretty disingenuous. You handle one of these cases by running a thorough investigation, not by turning it into a bureaucratic circus. I’ve been doing that my whole life. This case is pretty simple–big, but simple–and for all practical purposes it’s already closed. The real help came from the Mounties. They did a nice job for us, a ton of corroborative evidence, time, place, fingerprints, catching people from the plane to interview. And the Japanese police–Christ, they’re ready to eat nails, they’re so angry about what happened. They’re talking to all of the surviving conspirators. You, and we, don’t want-to know their interrogation methods. But their due process is not our problem. I’m ready to defend what you said last night. I’m ready to walk through everything we know.”
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“Do that, this afternoon,” van Damm told him. “I’ll make sure you get the press coverage.”
“Yes, sir.”
“So you can’t be part of the Kealty thing?” Jack asked.
“No, sir. You cannot allow the process to be polluted in any way.”
“But you can advise me on it?” President Ryan went on. “I need legal counsel of some sort.”
“That you do, and, yes, Mr. President, I can do that.”
“You know, Martin, at the end of this–”
Ryan cut his chief of staff off cold, even before the attorney could react. “No, Arnie, none of that. God damn it! I will not play that game. Mr. Martin, I like your instincts. We play this one absolutely straight. We get professionals to run it, and we trust them to be pros. I am sick and fucking tired of special prosecutors and special this and special that. If you don’t have people you can trust to do the job right, then what the hell are they doing there in the first place?”
Van Damm shifted in his seat. “You’re a naif, Jack.”
“Fine, Arnie, and we’ve been running the government with politically aware people since before I was born, and look where it’s gotten us!” Ryan stood to pace around the room. It was a presidential prerogative. “I’m tired of all this. What ever happened to honesty, Arnie? What ever happened to telling the goddamned truth? It’s all a fucking game here, and the object of the game isn’t to do the right thing, the object of the game is to stay here. It’s not supposed to be that way! And I’ll be damned if I’ll perpetuate a game I don’t like.” Jack turned to Pat Martin. “Tell me about that FBI case.”
Martin blinked, not knowing why that had come up, but he told the story anyway. “They even made a bad movie about it. Some civil-rights workers got popped by the local Klukkers. Two of them were local cops, too, and the case wasn’t going anywhere, so the Bureau got involved under interstate commerce and civil rights statutes. Dan Murray and I were rookies back then. I was in Buffalo at the time. He was in Philly. They brought us down to work with Big Joe Fitzgerald. He was one of Hoover’s roving inspectors. I was there when they found the bod-
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ies. Nasty,” Martin said, remembering the sight and the horrid smell. “All they wanted to do was to get citizens registered to vote, and they got killed for it, and the local cops weren’t doing anything about it. It’s funny, but when you see that sort of thing, it isn’t abstract anymore. It isn’t a document or a case study or a form to fill out. It just gets real as hell when you look at bodies that’ve been in the ground for two weeks. Those Klukker bastards broke the law and killed fellow citizens who were doing something the Constitution says isn’t just okay–it’s a right. So, we got ’em, and put ’em all away.”
“Why, Mr. Martin?” Jack asked. The response was exactly what he expected.
“Because I swore an oath, Mr. President. That’s why.” “So did I, Mr. Martin.” And it wasn’t to any goddamned game.
THE CUEING WAS somewhat equivocal. The Iraqi military used hundreds of radio frequencies, mainly FM VHP bands, and the traffic, while unusual for the overall situation, was routine in its content. There were thousands of messages, as many as fifty going at any given moment, and STORM TRACK didn’t begin to have enough linguists to keep track of them all, though it had to do just that. The command circuits for senior officers were well known, but these were encrypted, meaning that computers in KKMC had to play with the signals in order to make sense of what sounded like static. Fortunately a number of defectors had come across with examples of the encryption hardware, and others trickled over various borders with daily keying sequences, all to be handsomely rewarded by the Saudis.
The use of radios was more now rather than less. The senior Iraqi officers were probably less concerned with electronic intercepts than with who might be listening in on a telephone line. That simple fact told the senior watch officers a lot, and a document was even now being prepared to go up the ladder to the DCI for delivery to the President.
STORM TRACK looked like most such stations. One
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huge antenna array, called an Elephant Cage for its circular configuration, both detected and localized signals, while other towering whip antennas handled other tasks. The listening station had been hastily built during the buildup for DESERT STORM as a means of gathering tactical intelligence for allied military units, then to be expanded for continuing interest in the region. The Kuwaitis had funded the sister station, PALM BOWL, for which they were rewarded with a good deal of the “take.”
“That’s three,” a technician said at the latter station, reading off his screen. “Three senior officers heading to the racetrack. A little early in the day to play the ponies, isn’t it?”
“A meet?” his lieutenant asked. This was a military station, and the technician, a fifteen-year sergeant, knew quite a bit more about the job than his new boss. At least the elltee was smart enough to ask questions.